Yes, it's an involving show, but I know what you mean about Anne Reid. There's always been something off-putting about her. She's done a lot of TV, but the only movie I've seen her in was The Mother. Strangely enough, that off-putting quality fits in well with both that movie and the idiosyncratic families in Halifax.

Have there ever been so many new series on TV as there are now? Every movie channel now has to have its own original programming, and all the "tweeners" as well (USA, TBS, etc.). At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if The Weather Channel started doing original drama. I'm finding it impossible to keep up with everything.

But out of this overkill, one show does stand out, IMO, and that's The Knick on Cinemax. It's a medical drama set in NY at the beginning of the 20th century, and it looks like a movie. Steven Soderbergh is directing, and Clive Owens stars. The show is a grim look at a world hovering on the brink of great medical breakthroughs...but it's not there yet.

Cinemax is repeating the first episode tonight right before showing the second episode.

I've just caught up with The Knick, and yes, it is head and shoulders above the other new series. The money they've poured into that show! The attention to detail is astonishing, both in the 1900 settings and the way medicine was practiced at the time. (Such as surgeons operating without surgical masks or gloves, which hadn't been invented yet.) Soderbergh and Owen are a winning combination. This is quality TV.

It's interesting, though, that it's one of two new shows featuring a drug-addicted doctor as the protagonist. The other is Rush, nowhere near the same class as The Knick.

Has anyone been watching Outlander? I didn't expect to like it much, since Diana Gabaldon writes romances among other things. But it really pulls you in, and the romance is mostly in the landscape...I never knew Scotland was so beautiful. The last episode was a shocker, with one really harsh and cruel scene.

I rather like Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple. She's gentle and unobtrusive, like everybody's favorite aunt. Nobody can top Joan Hickson's performance, but A Caribbean Mystery was good, old-fashioned fun.

The Joan Hickson series was different from all the other Marple series in that it went for a realistic picture of murders and their aftermaths -- a rather daring move, considering that Agatha Christie virtually invented the cozy mystery. McKenzie is probably more like what Christie had in mind; she fits into the cozy pattern quite well. But Hickson is the one I'll always remember.